"Where art thou? Where art thou, O home so dear?"

She was thinking of this still as, her salutation over, she seated herself in the chair Dr. von Shierbrand placed for her.

"Busy thinking this morning, Miss Barrington?" Mrs. Dennison asked gently. "That tells me you're meaning to do some good thing to-day. I can't say how splendid you social workers seem to us common folks."

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Dennison!" Kate protested. "You and your kind are the true social workers. If only women—all women—understood how to make true homes, there wouldn't be any need for people like us. We're only well-intentioned fools who go around putting plasters over the sores. We don't even reach down as far as the disease—though I suppose we think we do when we get a lot of statistics together. But the men and women who go about their business, doing their work well all of the time, are the preventers of social trouble. Isn't that so, Dr. von Shierbrand?"

That amiable German readjusted his glasses upon his handsome nose and began to talk about the Second Part of "Faust." The provocation, though slight, had seemed to him sufficient.

"My husband has already eaten and gone!" observed Honora with some chagrin. "Can't you use your influence, Mrs. Dennison, to make him spend a proper amount of time at the table?"

"Oh, he doesn't need to eat except once in a great while. He has the ways of genius, Mrs. Fulham. Geniuses like to eat at odd times, and my own feeling is that they should be allowed to do as they please. It is very bad for geniuses to make them follow a set plan," said Mrs. Dennison earnestly.

"That woman," observed Dr. von Shierbrand under his breath to Kate, "has the true feminine wisdom. She should have been the wife of a great man. It was such qualities which Goethe meant to indicate in his Marguerite."

Honora, who had overheard, lifted her pensive gray eyes and interchanged a long look with Dr. von Shierbrand. Each seemed to be upon the verge of some remark.

"Well," said Kate briskly, "if you want to speak, why don't you? Are your thoughts too deep for words?"

Von Shierbrand achieved a laugh, but Honora was silent. She seemed to want to say that there was more than one variety of feminine wisdom; while Von Shierbrand, Kate felt quite sure, would have maintained that there was but one—the instinctive sort which "Marguerite knew."

* * * * *

The day that Mary Morrison was to arrive conflicted with the visit of a very great Frenchman to Professor Fulham's laboratory.

"I really don't see how I'm to meet the child, Kate," Honora said anxiously to her friend. "Do you think you could manage to get down to the station?"

Kate could and did go. This girl, like herself, was very much on her own resources, she imagined. She was coming, as Kate had come only the other day, to a new and forbidding city, and Kate's heart warmed to her. It seemed rather a tragedy, at best, to leave the bland Californian skies and to readjust life amid the iron compulsion of Chicago. Kate pictured her as a little thing, depressed, weary with her long journey, and already homesick.

The reality was therefore somewhat of a surprise. As Kate stood waiting by the iron gate watching the outflowing stream of people with anxious eyes, she saw a little furore centered about the person of an opulent young woman who had, it appeared, many elaborate farewells to make to her fellow-passengers. Two porters accompanied her, carrying her smart bags, and, even with so much assistance, she was draped with extra garments, which hung from her arms in varying and seductive shades of green. She herself was in green of a subtle olive shade, and her plumes and boa, her chains and chatelaine, her hand-bags and camera, marked her as the traveler triumphant and expectant. Like an Arabian princess, borne across the desert to the home of her future lord, she came panoplied with splendor. The consciousness of being a personage, by the mere right conferred by regal womanhood-in-flower, emanated from her. And the world accepted her smilingly at her own estimate. She wished to play at being queen. What more simple? Let her have her game. On every hand she found those who were—or who delightedly pretended to be—her subjects.

Once beyond the gateway, this exuberant creature paused. "And now," she said to a gentleman more assiduous than the rest, who waited upon her and who was laden with her paraphernalia, "you must help me to identify my cousin. That will be easy enough, too, for they say we resemble each other."

That gave Kate her cue. She went forward with outstretched hand.

"I am your cousin's emissary, Miss Morrison," she said. "I am Kate Barrington, and I came to greet you because your cousin was unable to get here, and is very, very sorry about it."

Miss Morrison revealed two deep dimples when she smiled, and held out so much of a hand as she could disengage from her draperies. She presented her fellow-traveler; she sent a porter for a taxi. All was exhilaratingly in commotion about her; and Kate found herself apportioning the camera and some of the other things to herself.

They had quite a royal setting-forth. Every one helped who could find any excuse for doing so; others looked on. Miss Morrison nodded and smiled; the chauffeur wheeled his machine splendidly, making dramatic gestures which had the effect of causing commerce to pause till the princess was under way.

"Be sure," warned Miss Morrison, "to drive through the pleasantest streets."

Then she turned to Kate with a deliciously reproachful expression on her face.

"Why didn't you order blue skies for me?" she demanded.

* * * * *

Kate never forgot the expression of Miss Morrison's face when she was ushered into Honora's "sanitary drawing-room," as Dr. von Shierbrand had dubbed it. True, the towers of Harper Memorial Library showed across the Plaisance through the undraped windows, mitigating the gravity of the outlook, and the innumerable lights of the Midway already began to render less austere the January twilight. But the brown walls, the brown rug, the Mission furniture in weathered oak, the corner clock,—an excellent time-piece,—the fireplace with its bronze vases, the etchings of foreign architecture, and the bookcase with Ruskin, Eliot, Dickens, and all the Mid-Victorian celebrities in sets, produced but a grave and unillumined interior.

"Oh!" cried Miss Morrison with ill-concealed dismay. And then, after a silence: "But where do you sit when you're sociable?"

"Here," said Kate. She wasn't going to apologize for Honora to a pair of exclamatory dimples!

"But you can be intimate here?" Miss Morrison inquired.

"We're not intimate," flashed Kate. "We're too busy—and we respect each other too much."

Miss Morrison sank into a chair and revealed the tint of her lettuce-green petticoat beneath her olive-green frock.

"I'm making you cross with me," she said regretfully. "Please don't dislike me at the outset. You see, out in California we're not so up and down as you are here. If you were used to spending your days in the shade of yellow walls, with your choice of hammocks, and with nothing to do but feed the parrot and play the piano, why, I guess you'd—"

She broke off and stared about her.

"Why, there isn't any piano!" she cried. "Do you mean Honora has no piano?"

"What would be the use? She doesn't play."

"I must order one in the morning, then. Honora wouldn't care, would she? Oh, when do you suppose she'll be home? Does she like to stay over in that queer place you told me of, fussing around with those frogs?"

Kate had been rash enough to endeavor to explain something of the Fulhams' theories regarding the mechanistic conception of life. There was nothing to do but accord Miss Morrison the laugh which she appeared to think was coming to her.

"I can see that I shouldn't have told you about anything like that," Kate said. "I see how mussy you would think any scientific experiment to be. And, really, matters of greater importance engage your attention."

She was quite serious. She had swiftly made up her mind that Mary Morrison, with her conscious seductions, was a much more important factor in the race than austere Honora Fulham. But Miss Morrison was suspicious of satire.

"Oh, I think science important!" she protested.

"No, you don't," declared Kate; "you only wish you did. Come, we'll go to your room."

It was the rear room on the second floor, and it presented a stern parallelogram occupied by the bare necessaries of a sleeping-apartment. The walls and rug were gray, the furniture of mahogany. Mary Morrison looked at it a moment with a slow smile. Then she tossed her green coat and her hat with its sweeping veil upon the bed. She flung her camera and her magazines upon the table. She opened her traveling-bag, and, with hands that almost quivered with impatience, placed upon the toilet-table the silver implements that Honora had sent her and scattered broadcast among them her necklaces and bracelets.

"I'll have some flowering plants to-morrow," she told Kate. "And when my trunks and boxes come, I'll make the wilderness blossom like a rose. How have you decorated your room?"

"I haven't much money," said Kate bluntly; "but I've—well, I've ventured on my own interpretations of what a bed-sitting-room should be."

Miss Morrison threw her a bright glance.

"I'll warrant you have," she said. "I should think you'd contrive a very original sort of a place. Thank you so much for looking after me. I brought along a gown for dinner. Naturally, I didn't want to make a dull impression at the outset. Haven't I heard that you dine out at some sort of a place where geniuses congregate?"

* * * * *

Years afterward, Kate used to think about the moment when Honora and her cousin met. Honora had come home, breathless from the laboratory. It had been a stirring afternoon for her. She had heard words of significant appreciation spoken to David by the men whom, out of all the world, she would have chosen to have praise him. She looked at Miss Morrison, who had come trailing down in a cerise evening gown as if she were a bright creature of another species, somewhat, Kate could not help whimsically thinking, as a philosophic beaver might have looked at a bird of paradise. Then Honora had kissed her cousin.

"Dear blue-eyed Mary!" she had cried. "Welcome to a dull and busy home."

"How good of you to take me in," sighed Miss Morrison. "I hated to bother you, Honora, but I thought you might keep me out of mischief."

"Have you been getting into mischief?" Honora asked, still laughing.

"Not quite," answered her cousin, blushing bewitchingly. "But I'm always on the verge of it. It's the Californian climate, I think."

"So exuberant!" cried Honora.

"That's it!" agreed "Blue-eyed Mary." "I thought you'd understand. Here, I'm sure, you're all busy and good."

"Some of us are," agreed Honora. "There's my Kate, for example. She's one of the most useful persons in town, and she's just as interesting as she is useful."

Miss Morrison turned her smiling regard on Kate. "But, Honora, she's been quite abrupt with me. She doesn't approve of me. I suppose she discovered at once that I wasn't useful."

"I didn't," protested Kate. "I think decorative things are of the utmost use."

"There!" cried Miss Morrison; "you can see for yourself that she doesn't like me!"

"Nonsense," said Kate, really irritated. "I shall like you if Honora does. Let me help you dress, Honora dear. Are you tired or happy that your cheeks are so flushed?"

"I'm both tired and happy, Kate. Excuse me, Mary, won't you? If David comes in you'll know him by instinct. Believe me, you are very welcome."

Up in Honora's bedroom, Kate asked, as she helped her friend into the tidy neutral silk she wore to dinner: "Is the blue-eyed one going to be a drain on you, girl? You oughtn't to carry any more burdens. Are you disturbed? Is she more of a proposition than you counted on?"

Honora turned her kind but troubled eyes on Kate.

"I can't explain," she said in so low a voice that Kate could hardly catch the words. "She's like me, isn't she? I seemed to see—"

"What?"

"Ghosts—bright ghosts. Never mind."

"You're not thinking that you are old, are you?" cried Kate. "Because that's absurd. You're wonderful—wonderful."

Laughter arose to them—the mingled voices of David Fulham and his newfound cousin by marriage.

"Good!" cried Honora with evident relief. "They seem to be taking to each other. I didn't know how David would like her."

He liked her very well, it transpired, and when the introductions had been made at the Caravansary, it appeared that every one was delighted with her. If their reception of her differed from that they had given to Kate, it was nevertheless kindly—almost gay. They leaped to the conclusion that Miss Morrison was designed to enliven them. And so it proved. She threw even the blithe Marna Cartan temporarily into the shade; and Dr. von Shierbrand, who was accustomed to talking with Kate upon such matters as the national trait of incompetence, or the reprehensible modern tendency of coddling the unfit, turned his attention to Miss Morrison and to lighter subjects.

* * * * *

Two days later a piano stood in Honora's drawing-room, and Miss Morrison sat before it in what may be termed occult draperies, making lovely music. Technically, perhaps, the music left something to be desired. Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna Cartan thought so, at any rate. But the habitues of Mrs. Dennison's near-home soon fell into the way of trailing over to the Fulhams' in Mary Morrison's wake, and as they grouped themselves about on the ugly Mission furniture, in a soft light produced by many candles, and an atmosphere drugged with highly scented flowers, they fell under the spell of many woven melodies.

When Mary Morrison's tapering fingers touched the keys they brought forth a liquid and caressing sound like falling water in a fountain, and when she leaned over them as if to solicit them to yield their kind responses, her attitude, her subtle garments, the swift interrogative turns of her head, brought visions to those who watched and listened. Kate dreamed of Italian gardens—the gardens she never had seen; Von Shierbrand thought of dark German forests; Honora, of a moonlit glade. These three confessed so much. The others did not tell their visions, but obviously they had them. Blue-eyed Mary was one of those women who inspire others. She was the quintessence of femininity, and she distilled upon the air something delicately intoxicating, like the odor of lotus-blossoms.

It was significant that the Fulhams' was no longer a house of suburban habits. Ten o'clock and lights out had ceased to be the rule. After music there frequently was a little supper, and every one was pressed into service in the preparation of it. Something a trifle fagged and hectic began to show in the faces of Mrs. Dennison's family, and that good woman ventured to offer some reproof.

"You all are hard workers," she said, "and you ought to be hard resters, too. You're not acting sensibly. Any one would think you were the idle rich."

"Well, we're entitled to all the pleasure we can get," Mary Morrison had retorted. "There are people who think that pleasure isn't for them. But I am just the other way—I take it for granted that pleasure is my right. I always take everything in the way of happiness that I can get my hands on."

"You mean, of course, my dear child," said the gentle Mrs. Goodrich, "all that you can get which does not belong to some one else."

Blue-eyed Mary laughed throatily.

"Fortunately," she said, "there's pleasure enough to go around. It's like air, every one can breathe it in."



VII

But though Miss Morrison had made herself so brightly, so almost universally at home, there was one place into which she did not venture to intrude. This was Kate's room. Mary had felt from the first a lack of encouragement there, and although she liked to talk to Kate, and received answers in which there appeared to be no lack of zest and response, yet it seemed to be agreed that when Miss Barrington came tramping home from her hard day's work, she was to enjoy the solitude of her chamber.

Mary used to wonder what went on there. Miss Barrington could be very still. The hours would pass and not a sound would issue from that high upper room which looked across the Midway and included the satisfactory sight of the Harper Memorial and the massed University buildings. Kate would, indeed, have had difficulty in explaining that she was engaged in the mere operation of living. Her life, though lonely, and to an extent undirected, seemed abundant. Restless she undoubtedly was, but it was a restlessness which she succeeded in holding in restraint. At first when she came up to the city the daze of sorrow was upon her. But this was passing. A keen awareness of life suffused her now and made her observant of everything about her. She felt the tremendous incongruities of city life, and back of these incongruities, the great, hidden, passionate purpose which, ultimately, meant a city of immeasurable power. She rejoiced, as the young and gallant dare to do, that she was laboring in behalf of that city. Not one bewildered, wavering, piteous life was adjusted through her efforts that she did not feel that her personal sum of happiness had received an addition. That deep and burning need for religion, or for love, or for some splendid and irresistible impetus, was satisfied in part by her present work.

To start out each morning to answer the cry of distress, to understand the intricate yet effective machinery of benevolent organizations, so that she could call for aid here and there, and have instant and intelligent cooeperation, to see broken lives mended, the friendless befriended, the tempted lifted up, the evil-doer set on safe paths, warmed and sustained her. That inquisitive nature of hers was now so occupied with the answering of practical and immediate questions that it had ceased to beat upon the hollow doors of the Unknown with unavailing inquiries.

So far as her own life was concerned, she seemed to have found, not a haven, but a broad sea upon which she could triumphantly sail. That shame at being merely a woman, with no task, no utility, no independence, had been lifted from her. So, in gratitude, everywhere, at all times, she essayed to help other women to a similar independence. She did not go so far as to say that it was the panacea for all ills, but she was convinced that more than half of the incoherent pain of women's lives could be avoided by the mere fact of financial independence. It became a religion with her to help the women with whom she came in contact, to find some unguessed ability or applicability which would enable them to put money in their purses. With liberty to leave a miserable condition, one often summoned courage to remain and face it. She pointed that out to her wistful constituents, the poor little wives who had found in marriage only a state of supine drudgery, and of unexpectant, monotonous days. She was trying to give them some game to play. That was the way she put it to them. If one had a game to play, there was use in living. If one had only to run after the balls of the players, there was not zest enough to carry one along.

She began talking now and then at women's clubs and at meetings of welfare workers. Her abrupt, picturesque way of saying things "carried," as an actor would put it. Her sweet, clear contralto held the ear; her aquiline comeliness pleased the eye without enticing it; her capable, fit-looking clothes were so happily secondary to her personality that even the women could not tell how she was dressed. She was the least seductive person imaginable; and she looked so self-sufficient that it seldom occurred to any one to offer her help. Yet she was in no sense bold or aggressive. No one ever thought of accusing her of being any of those things. Many loved her—loved her wholesomely, with a love in which trust was a large element. Children loved her, and the sick, and the bad. They looked to her to help them out of their helplessness. She was very young, but, after all, she was maternal. A psychologist would have said that there was much of the man about her, and her love of the fair chance, her appetite for freedom, her passion for using her own capabilities might, indeed, have seemed to be of the masculine variety of qualities; but all this was more than offset by this inherent impulse for maternity. She was born, apparently, to care for others, but she had to serve them freely. She had to be the dispenser of good. She was unconsciously on the outlook against those innumerable forms of slavishness which affection or religion gilded and made to seem like noble service.

Among those who loved her was August von Shierbrand. He loved her apparently in spite of himself. She did not in the least accord with his romantic ideas of what a woman should be. He was something of a poet, and a specialized judge of poetry, and he liked women of the sort who inspired a man to write lyrics. He had tried unavailingly to write lyrics about Kate, but they never would "go." He confessed his fiascoes to her.

"Nothing short of martial measures seems to suit you," he said laughingly.

"But why write about me at all, Dr. von Shierbrand?" she inquired. "I don't want any one writing about me. What I want to do is to learn how to write myself—not because I feel impelled to be an author, but because I come across things almost every day which ought to be explained."

"You are completely absorbed in this extraordinary life of yours!" he complained.

"Why not!" demanded Kate. "Aren't you completely absorbed in your life?"

"Of course I am. But teaching is my chosen profession."

"Well, life is my chosen profession. I want to see, feel, know, breathe, Life. I thought I'd never be able to get at it. I used to feel like a person walking in a mist. But it's different now. Everything has taken on a clear reality to me. I'm even beginning to understand that I myself am a reality and that my thoughts as well as my acts are entities. I'm getting so that I can define my own opinions. I don't believe there's anybody in the city who would so violently object to dying as I would, Dr. von Shierbrand."

The sabre cut on Von Shierbrand's face gleamed.

"You certainly seem at the antipodes of death, Miss Barrington," he said with a certain thickness in his utterance. "And I, personally, can think of nothing more exhilarating than in living beside you. I meant to wait—to wait a long time before asking you. But what is the use of waiting? I want you to marry me. I feel as if it must be—as if I couldn't get along without you to help me enjoy things."

Kate looked at him wonderingly. It was before the afternoon concert and they were sitting in Honora's rejuvenated drawing-room while they waited for the others to come downstairs.

"But, Dr. von Shierbrand!" she cried, "I don't like a city without suburbs!"

"I beg your pardon!"

"I like to see signs of my City of Happiness as I approach—outlying villas, and gardens, and then straggling, pleasant neighborhoods, and finally Town."

"Oh, I see. You mean I've been too unexpected. Can't you overlook that? You're an abrupt person yourself, you know. I'm persuaded that we could be happy together."

"But I'm not in love, Dr. von Shierbrand. I'm sorry. Frankly, I'd like to be."

"And have you never been? Aren't you nursing a dream of—"

"No, no; I haven't had a hopeless love if that's what you mean. I'm all lucid and clear and comfortable nowadays—partly because I've stopped thinking about some of the things to which I couldn't find answers, and partly because Life is answering some of my questions."

"How to be happy without being in love, perhaps."

"Well, I am happy—temperately so. Perhaps that's the only degree of happiness I shall ever know. Of course, when I was younger I thought I should get to some sort of a place where I could stand in swimming glory and rejoice forever, but I see now how stupid I was to think anything of the sort. I hoped to escape the commonplace by reaching some beatitude, but now I have found that nothing really is commonplace. It only seems so when you aren't understanding enough to get at the essential truth of things."

"Oh, that's true! That's true!" cried Von Shierbrand.

"Oh, Kate, I do love you. You seem to complete me. When I'm with you I understand myself. Please try to love me, dear. We'll get a little home and have a garden and a library—think how restful it will be. I can't tell you how I want a place I can call home."

"There they come," warned Kate as she heard footsteps on the stairs. "You must take 'no' for your answer, dear man. I feel just like a mother to you."

Dr. von Shierbrand arose, obviously offended, and he allied himself with Mary Morrison on the way to the concert. Kate walked with Honora and David until they met with Professor Wickersham, who was also bound for Mandel Hall and the somewhat tempered classicism which the Theodore Thomas Orchestra offered to "the University crowd."

"Please walk with me, Miss Barrington," said Wickersham. "I want you to explain the universe to me."

"I can do that nicely," retorted Kate, "because Dr. von Shierbrand has already explained it to me."

Blue-eyed Mary was pouting. She never liked any variety of amusement, conversational or otherwise, in which she was not the center.

* * * * *

So Kate's life sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself being enriched by her experiences.

She enjoyed being brought into contact with the people she met in her work—not alone the beneficiaries of her ministrations, but the policemen and the police matrons and the judges of the police court. She joined a society of "welfare workers," and attended their suppers and meetings, and tried to learn by their experience and to keep her own ideas in abeyance.

She could not help noticing that she differed in some particulars from most of these laborers in behalf of the unfortunate. They brought practical, unimaginative, and direct minds to bear upon the problems before them, while she never could escape her theories or deny herself the pleasure of looking beyond the events to the causes which underlay them. This led her to jot down her impressions in a notebook, and to venture on comments concerning her experiences.

Moreover, not only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the sardonic commentators upon modern life—Ibsen, Strindberg, and many others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had been the interpreters of women's hidden meanings, and that they had been the setters-forth of new visions of sacredness and fresh definitions of liberty.

It was these men—these aloof and unsentimental ones—who had pointed out that the sin of sins committed by women had been the indifference to their own personalities. They had been echoers, conformers, imitators; even, in their own way, cowards. They had feared the conventions, and had been held in thrall by their own carefully nursed ideals of themselves. They had lacked the ability to utilize their powers of efficiency; had paid but feeble respect to their own ideals; had altogether measured themselves by too limited a standard. Failing wifely joy, they had too often regarded themselves as unsuccessful, and had apologized tacitly to the world for using their abilities in any direction save one. They had not permitted themselves that strong, clean, robust joy of developing their own powers for mere delight in the exercise of power.

But now, so Kate believed,—so her great instructors informed her,—they were awakening to their privileges. An intenser awareness of life, of the right to expression, and of satisfaction in constructive performances was stirring in them. If they desired enfranchisement, they wanted it chiefly for spiritual reasons. This was a fact which the opponents of the advancing movement did not generally recognize. Kate shrank from those fruitless arguments at the Caravansary with the excellent men who gravely and kindly rejected suffrage for women upon the ground that they were protecting them by doing so. They did not seem to understand that women desired the ballot because it was a symbol as well as because it was an instrument and an argument. If it was to benefit the working woman in the same way in which it benefited the working man, by making individuality a thing to be considered; if it was to give the woman taxpayer certain rights which would put her on a par with the man taxpayer, a thousand times more it was to benefit all women by removing them from the class of the unconsidered, the superfluous, and the negligible.

Yes, women were wanting the ballot because it included potentiality, and in potentiality is happiness. No field seems fair if there is no gateway to it—no farther field toward which the steps may be turned. Kate was getting hold of certain significant similes. She saw that it was past the time of walls and limits. Walled cities were no longer endurable, and walled and limited possibilities were equally obsolete. If the departure of the "captains and the kings" was at hand, if the new forces of democracy had routed them, if liberty for all men was now an ethic need of civilization, so political recognition was necessary for women. Women required the ballot because the need was upon them to perform great labors. Their unutilized benevolence, their disregarded powers of organization, their instinctive sense of economy, their maternal-oversoul, all demanded exercise. Women were the possessors of certain qualities so abundant, so ever-renewing, that the ordinary requirements of life did not give them adequate employment. With a divine instinct of high selfishness, of compassion, of realization, they were seeking the opportunity to exercise these powers.

"The restlessness of women," "the unquiet sex," were terms which were becoming glorious in Kate's ears. She saw no reason why women as well as men should not be allowed to "dance upon the floor of chance." All about her were women working for the advancement of their city, their country, and their race. They gave of their fortunes, of their time, of all the powers of their spirit. They warred with political machines, with base politicians, with public contumely, with custom. What would have crushed women of equally gentle birth a generation before, seemed now of little account to these workers. They looked beyond and above the irritation of the moment, holding to the realization that their labors were of vital worth. Under their administration communities passed from shameless misery to self-respect; as the result of their generosity, courts were sustained in which little children could make their plea and wretched wives could have justice. Servants, wantons, outcasts, the insane, the morally ill, all were given consideration in this new religion of compassion. It was amazing to Kate to see light come to dull eyes—eyes which had hitherto been lit only with the fires of hate. As she walked the gray streets in the performance of her tasks, weary and bewildered though she often was, she was sustained by the new discovery of that ancient truth that nothing human can be foreign to the person of good will. Neither dirt nor hate, distrust, fear, nor deceit should be permitted to blind her to the essential similarity of all who were "bound together in the bundle of life."

It was not surprising that at this time she should begin writing short articles for the women's magazines on the subjects which presented themselves to her in her daily work. Her brief, spontaneous, friendly articles, full of meat and free from the taint of bookishness, won favor from the first. She soon found her evenings occupied with her somewhat matter-of-fact literary labors. But this work was of such a different character from that which occupied her in the daytime that so far from fatiguing her it gave an added zest to her days.

She was not fond of idle evenings. Sitting alone meant thinking, and thought meant an unconquerable homesickness for that lonely man back in Silvertree from whom she had parted peremptorily, and toward whom she dared not make any overtures. Sometimes she sent him an article clipped from the magazines or newspapers dealing with some scientific subject, and once she mailed him a number of little photographs which she had taken with her own camera and which might reveal to him, if he were inclined to follow their suggestions, something of the life in which she was engaged. But no recognition of these wordless messages came from him. He had been unable to forgive her, and she beat down the question that would arise as to whether she also had been at fault. She was under the necessity of justifying herself if she would be happy. It was only after many months had passed that she learned how a heavy burden may become light by the confession of a fault.

Meantime, she was up early each morning; she breakfasted with the most alert residents of the Caravansary; then she took the street-car to South Chicago and reported at a dismal office. Here the telephone served to put her into communication with her superior at Settlement House. She reported what she had done the day before (though, to be sure, a written report was already on its way), she asked advice, she talked over ways and means. Then she started upon her daily rounds. These might carry her to any one of half a dozen suburbs or to the Court of Domestic Relations, or over on the West Side of the city to the Juvenile Court. She appeared almost daily before some police magistrate, and not long after her position was assumed, she was called upon to give evidence before the grand jury.

"However do you manage it all?" Honora asked one evening when Kate had been telling a tale of psychically sinister import. "How can you bring yourself to talk over such terrible and revolting subjects as you have to, before strange men in open court?"

"A nice old man asked me that very question to-day as I was coming out of the courtroom," said Kate. "He said he didn't like to see young women doing such work as I was doing. 'Who will do it, then?' I asked. 'The men,' said he. 'Do you think we can leave it to them?' I asked. 'Perhaps not,' he admitted. 'But at least it could be left to older women.' 'They haven't the strength for it,' I told him, and then I gave him a notion of the number of miles I had ridden the day before in the street-car-it was nearly sixty, I believe. 'Are you sure it's worth it?' he asked. He had been listening to the complaint I was making against a young man who has, to my knowledge, completely destroyed the self-respect of five girls—and I've known him but a short time. You can make an estimate of the probable number of crimes of his if it amuses you. 'Don't you think it's worth while if that man is shut up where he can't do any more mischief?' I asked him. Of course he thought it was; but he was still shaking his head over me when I left him. He still thought I ought to be at home making tidies. I can't imagine that it ever occurred to him that I was a disinterested economist in trying to save myself from waste."

She laughed lightly in spite of her serious words.

"Anyway," she said, "I find this kind of life too amusing to resign. One of the settlement workers was complaining to me this morning about the inherent lack of morals among some of our children. It appears that the Harrigans—there are seven of them—commandeered some old clothes that had been sent in for charitable distribution. They poked around in the trunks when no one was watching and helped themselves to what they wanted. The next day they came to a party at the Settlement House togged up in their plunder. My friend reproved them, but they seemed to be impervious to her moral comments, so she went to the mother. 'Faith,' said Mrs. Harrigan, 'I tould them not to be bringing home trash like that. "It ain't worth carryin' away," says I to them.'"

About this time Kate was invited to become a resident of Hull House. She was touched and complimented, but, with a loyalty for which there was, perhaps, no demand, she remained faithful to her friends at the Caravansary. She was loath to take up her residence with a group which would have too much community of interest. The ladies at Mrs. Dennison's offered variety. Life was dramatizing itself for her there. In Honora and Marna and Mrs. Barsaloux and those quiet yet intelligent gentlewomen, Mrs. Goodrich and Mrs. Applegate, in the very servants whose pert individualism distressed the mid-Victorian Mrs. Dennison, Kate saw working those mysterious world forces concerning which she was so curious. The frequent futility of Nature's effort to throw to the top this hitherto unutilized feminine force was no less absorbing than the success which sometimes attended the impulsion. To the general and widespread convulsion, the observer could no more be oblivious than to an earthquake or a tidal wave.



VIII

Kate had not seen Lena Vroom for a long time, and she had indefinitely missed her without realizing it until one afternoon, as she was searching for something in her trunk, she came across a package of Lena's letters written to her while she was at Silvertree. That night at the table she asked if any one had seen Lena recently.

"Seen her?" echoed David Fulham. "I've seen the shadow of her blowing across the campus. She's working for her doctor's degree, like a lot of other silly women. She's living by herself somewhere, on crackers and cheese, no doubt."

"Would she really be so foolish?" cried Kate. "I know she's devoted to her work, but surely she has some sense of moderation."

"Not a bit of it," protested the scientist. "A person of mediocre attainments who gets the Ph.D. bee in her bonnet has no sense of any sort. I see them daily, men and women,—but women particularly,—stalking about the grounds and in and out of classes, like grotesque ghosts. They're staggering under a mental load too heavy for them, and actually it might be a physical load from its effects. They get lop-sided, I swear they do, and they acquire all sorts of miserable little personal habits that make them both pitiable and ridiculous. For my part, I believe the day will come when no woman will be permitted to try for the higher degrees till her brain has been scientifically tested and found to be adequate for the work."

"But as for Lena," said Kate, "I thought she was quite a wonder at her lessons."

"Up to a certain point," admitted Fulham, "I've no doubt she does very well. But she hasn't the capacity for higher work, and she'll be the last one to realize it. My advice to you, Miss Barrington, is to look up your friend and see what she is doing with herself. You haven't any of you an idea of the tragedies of the classroom, and I'll not tell them to you. But they're serious enough, take my word for it."

"Yes, do look her up, Kate," urged Honora.

"It's hard to manage anything extra during the day," said Kate. "I must go some evening."

"Perhaps Cousin Mary could go with you," suggested Honora. Honora threw a glance of affectionate admiration at her young cousin, who had blossomed out in a bewitching little frock of baby blue, and whose eyes reflected the color.

She was, indeed, an entrancing thing, was "Blue-eyed Mary." The tenderness of her lips, the softness of her complexion, the glamour of her glance increased day by day, and without apparent reason. She seemed to be more eloquent, with the sheer eloquence of womanly emotion. Everything that made her winning was intensified, as if Love, the Master, had touched to vividness what hitherto had been no more than a mere promise.

What was the secret of this exotic florescence? She went out only to University affairs with Honora or Kate, or to the city with Marna Cartan. Her interests appeared to be few; and she was neither a writer nor a receiver of letters. Altogether, the sources of that hidden joy which threw its enchantment over her were not to be guessed.

But what did it all matter? She was an exhilarating companion—and what a contrast to poor Lena! That night, lying in bed, Kate reproached herself for her neglect of her once so faithful friend. Lena might be going through some severe experience, alone and unaided. Kate determined to find out the truth, and as she had a half-holiday on Saturday, she started on her quest.

Lena, it transpired, had moved twice during the term and had neglected to register her latest address. So she was found only after much searching, and twilight was already gathering when Kate reached the dingy apartment in which Lena had secreted herself. It was a rear room up three flights of stairs, approached by a long, narrow corridor which the economical proprietor had left in darkness. Kate rapped softly at first; then, as no one answered, most sharply. She was on the point of going away when the door was opened a bare crack and the white, pinched face of Lena Vroom peered out.

"It's only Kate, Lena!" Then, as there was no response: "Aren't you going to let me in?"

Still Lena did not fling wide the door.

"Oh, Kate!" she said vaguely, in a voice that seemed to drift from a Maeterlinckian mist. "How are you?"

"Pretty sulky, thank you. Why don't you open the door, girl?"

At that Lena drew back; but she was obviously annoyed. Kate stepped into the bare, unkempt room. Remnants of a miserable makeshift meal were to be seen on a rickety cutting-table; the bed was unmade; and on the desk, in the center of the room, a drop-lamp with a leaking tube polluted the air. There was a formidable litter of papers on a great table, and before it stood a swivel chair where Lena Vroom had been sitting preparing for her degree.

Kate deliberately took this all in and then turned her gaze on her friend.

"What's the use, girl?" she demanded with more than her usual abruptness. "What are you doing it all for?"

Lena threw a haggard glance at her.

"We won't talk about that," she said in that remote, sunken voice. "I haven't the strength to discuss it. To be perfectly frank, Kate, you mustn't visit me now. You see, I'm studying night and day for the inquisition."

"The—"

"Yes, inquisition. You see, it isn't enough that my thesis should be finished. I can't get my degree without a last, terrible ordeal. Oh, Kate, you can't imagine what it is like! Girls who have been through it have told me. You are asked into a room where the most important members of the faculty are gathered. They sit about you in a semicircle and for hours they hurl questions at you, not necessarily questions relating to anything you have studied, but inquiries to test your general intelligence. It's a fearful experience."

She sank on her unmade cot, drawing a ragged sweater about her shoulders, and looked up at Kate with an almost furtive gaze. She always had been a small, meagre creature, but now she seemed positively shriveled. The pride and plenitude of womanhood were as far from her realization as they could be from a daughter of Eve. Sexless, stranded, broken before an undertaking too great for her, she sat there in the throes of a sudden, nervous chill. Then, after a moment or two, she began to weep and was rent and torn with long, shuddering sobs.

"I'm so afraid," she moaned. "Oh, Kate, I'm so terribly, terribly afraid! I know I'll fail."

Kate strangled down, "The best thing that could happen to you"; and said instead, "You aren't going about the thing in the best way to succeed."

"I've done all I could," moaned her friend. "I've only allowed myself four hours a night for sleep; and have hardly taken out time for meals. I've concentrated as it seems to me no one ever concentrated before."

"Oh, Lena, Lena!" Kate cried compassionately. "Can it really be that you have so little sense, after all? Oh, you poor little drowned rat, you." She bent over her, pulled the worn slippers from her feet, and thrust her beneath the covers.

"No, no!" protested Lena. "You mustn't, Kate! I've got to get at my books."

"Say another word and I'll throw them out of the window," cried Kate, really aroused. "Lie down there."

Lena began again to sob, but this time with helpless anger, for Kate looked like a grenadier as she towered there in the small room and it was easy to see that she meant to be obeyed. She explored Lena's cupboard for supplies, and found, after some searching, a can of soup and the inevitable crackers. She heated the soup, toasted the crackers, and forced Lena to eat. Then she extinguished the lamp, with its poisonous odor, and, wrapping herself in her cloak threw open the window and sat in the gloom, softly chatting about this and that. Lena made no coherent answers. She lay in sullen torment, casting tearful glances at her benevolent oppressor.

But Kate had set her will to conquer that of her friend and Lena's hysteric opposition was no match for it. Little by little the tense form beneath the blankets relaxed. Her stormily drawn breath became more even. At last she slept, which gave Kate an opportunity to slip out to buy a new tube for the lamp and adjust it properly. She felt quite safe in lighting it, for Lena lay in complete exhaustion, and she took the liberty of looking over the clothes which were bundled into an improvised closet on the back of the door. Everything was in wretched condition. Buttons and hooks were lacking; a heap of darning lay untouched; Lena's veil, with which she attempted to hide the ruin of her hat, was crumpled into the semblance of a rain-soaked cobweb; and her shoes had gone long without the reassurance of a good blacking.

Kate put some irons over the stove which served Lena as a cooking-range, and proceeded on a campaign of reconstruction. It was midnight when she finished, and she was weary and heartsick. The little, strained face on the pillow seemed to belong to one whom the furies were pursuing. Yet nothing was pursuing her save her own fanatical desire for a thing which, once obtained, would avail her nothing. She had not personality enough to meet life on terms which would allow her one iota of leadership. She was discountenanced by her inherent drabness: beaten by the limits of her capacity. When Kate had ordered the room,—scrupulously refraining from touching any of Lena's papers,—she opened the window and, putting the catch on the door, closed it softly behind her.

* * * * *

Kate's frequent visits to Lena, though brief, were none too welcome. Even the food she brought with her might better, in Lena's estimation, be dispensed with than that the all-absorbing reading and research should be interrupted. Finally Kate called one night to find Lena gone. She had taken her trunk and oil-stove and the overworked gas-lamp and had stolen away. To ferret her out would have been inexcusable.

"It shows how changed she is," Kate said to Honora. "Fancy the old-time Lena hiding from me!"

"You must think of her as having a run of fever, Kate. Whatever she does must be regarded as simply symptomatic," said Honora, understandingly. "She's really half-mad. David says the graduates are often like that—the feminine ones."

Kate tried to look at it in a philosophic way, but her heart yearned and ached over the poor, infatuated fugitive. The February convocation was drawing near, and with it Lena's dreaded day of examination. The night before its occurrence, the conversation at the Caravansary turned to the candidates for the honors.

"There are some who meet the quiz gallantly enough," David Fulham remarked. "But the majority certainly come like galley slaves scourged to their dungeon. Some of them would move a heart of stone with their sufferings. Honora, why don't you and Miss Barrington look up your friend Miss Vroom once more? She's probably needing you pretty badly."

"I don't mind being a special officer, Mr. Fulham," said Kate, "and it's my pride and pleasure to make child-beaters tremble and to arrest brawny fathers,—I make rather a specialty of six-foot ones,—but really I'm timid about going to Lena's again. She has given me to understand that she doesn't want me around, and I'm not enough of a pachyderm to get in the way of her arrows again."

But David Fulham couldn't take that view of it.

"She's not sane," he declared. "Couldn't be after such a course as she's been putting herself through. She needs help."

However, neither Kate nor Honora ventured to offer it. They spent the evening together in Honora's drawing-room. The hours passed more rapidly than they realized, and at midnight David came stamping in. His face was white.

"You haven't been to the laboratory, David?" reproached his wife. "Really, you mustn't. I thought it was agreed between us that we'd act like civilized householders in the evening." She was regarding him with an expression of affectionate reproof.

"I've been doing laboratory work," he said shortly, "but it wasn't in the chemical laboratory. Wickersham and I hunted up your friend—and we found her in a state of collapse."

"No!" cried Kate, starting to her feet.

"I told you, didn't I?" returned David. "Don't I know them, the geese? We had to break in her door, and there she was sitting at her study-table, staring at her books and seeing nothing. She couldn't talk to us—had a temporary attack of severe aphasia, I suppose. Wickersham said he'd been anxious about her for weeks—she's been specializing with him, you know."

"What did you do with her?" demanded Honora.

"Bundled her up in her outside garments and dragged her out of doors between us and made her walk. She could hardly stand at first. We had to hold her up. But we kept right on hustling her along, and after a time when the fresh air and exercise had got in their work, she could find the right word when she tried to speak to us. Then we took her to a restaurant and ordered a beefsteak and some other things. She wanted to go back to her room—said she had more studying to do; but we made it clear to her at last that it wasn't any use,—that she'd have to stand or fall on what she had. She promised us she wouldn't look at a book, but would go to bed and sleep, and anybody who has the hardihood to wish that she wins her degree may pray for a good night for her."

Honora was looking at her husband with a wide, shining gaze.

"How did you come to go to her, David?" she asked admiringly. "She wasn't in any of your classes."

"Now, don't try to make out that I'm benevolent, Honora," Fulham said petulantly. "I went because I happened to meet Wickersham on the Midway. She's been hiding, but he had searched her out and appealed to me to go with him. What I did was at his request."

"But she'll be refreshed in the morning," said Honora. "She'll come out all right, won't she?"

"How do I know?" demanded Fulham. "I suppose she'll feel like a man going to execution when she enters that council-room. Maybe she'll stand up to it and maybe she'll not. She'll spend as much nervous energy on the experience as would carry her through months of sane, reasonable living in the place she ought to be in—that is to say, in a millinery store or some plain man's kitchen."

"Oh, David!" said Honora with gentle wifely reproach.

But Fulham was making no apologies.

"If we men ill-treated women as they ill-treat themselves," he said, "we'd be called brutes of the worst sort."

"Of course!" cried Kate. "A person may have some right to ill-treat himself, but he never has any right to ill-treat another."

"If we hitched her up to a plough," went on Fulham, not heeding, "we shouldn't be overtaxing her physical strength any more than she overtaxes her mental strength when she tries—the ordinary woman, I mean, like Miss Vroom—to keep up to the pace set by men of first-rate caliber."

He went up to bed on this, still disturbed, and Honora and Kate, much depressed, talked the matter over. But they reached no conclusion. They wanted to go around the next morning and help Lena,—get her breakfast and see that she was properly dressed,—but they knew they would be unwelcome. Later they heard that she had come through the ordeal after a fashion. She had given indications of tremendous research. But her eyes, Wickersham told Kate privately, looked like diseased oysters, and it was easy to see that she was on the point of collapse.

Kate saw nothing of her until the day of convocation, though she tried several times to get into communication with her. There must have been quite two hundred figures in the line that wound before the President and the other dignitaries to receive their diplomas; and the great hall was thronged with interested spectators. Kate could have thrilled with pride of her alma mater had not her heart been torn with sympathy for her friend whose emaciated figure looked more pathetic than ever before. Now and then a spasmodic movement shook her, causing her head to quiver like one with the palsy and her hands to make futile gestures. And although she was the most touching and the least joyous of those who went forward to victory, she was not, after all, so very exceptional.

Kate could not help noticing how jaded and how spent were many of the candidates for the higher degrees. They seemed to move in a tense dream, their eyes turning neither to right nor left, and the whole of them bent on the one idea of their dear achievement. Although there were some stirring figures among them,—men and women who seemed to have come into the noble heritage which had been awaiting them,—there were more who looked depleted and unfit. It grew on Kate, how superfluous scholarship was when superimposed on a feeble personality. The colleges could not make a man, try as they might. They could add to the capacity of an endowed and adventurous individual, but for the inept, the diffident, their learning availed nothing. They could cram bewildered heads with facts and theories, but they could not hold the mediocre back from their inevitable anticlimax.

"A learned derelict is no better than any other kind," mused Kate compassionately. She resolved that now, at last, she would command Lena's obedience. She would compel her to take a vacation,—would find out what kind of a future she had planned. She would surround her with small, friendly offices; would help her to fit herself out in new garments, and would talk over ways and means with her.

She went the next day to the room where Lena's compassionate professors had found her that night of dread and terror before her examination. But she had disappeared again, and the landlady could give no information concerning her.



IX

The day was set. Marna was to sing. It seemed to the little group of friends as if the whole city palpitated with the fact. At any rate, the Caravansary did so. They talked of little else, and Mary Morrison wept for envy. Not that it was mean envy. Her weeping was a sort of tribute, and Marna felt it to be so.

"You're going to be wonderful," Mary sobbed. "The rest of us are merely young, or just women, or men. We can't be anything more no matter how hard we try, though we keep feeling as if we were something more. But you're going to SING! Oh, Marna!"

Time wore on, and Marna grew hectic with anticipation. Her lips were too red, her breath came too quickly; she intensified herself; and she practiced her quivering, fitful, passionate songs with religious devotion. So many things centered around the girl that it was no wonder that she began to feel a disproportionate sense of responsibility. All of her friends were taking it for granted that she would make a success.

Mrs. Barsaloux was giving a supper at the Blackstone after the performance. The opera people were coming and a number of other distinguished ones; and Marna was having a frock made of the color of a gold-of-Ophir rose satin which was to clothe her like sunshine. Honora brought out a necklace of yellow opals whimsically fashioned.

"I no longer use such things, child," she said with a touch of emotion. "And I want you to wear them with your yellow dress."

"Why, they're like drops of water with the sun in them!" cried Marna. "How good you all are to me! I can't imagine why."

When the great night came, the audience left something to be desired, both as to numbers and fashion. Although Marna's appearance had been well advertised, it was evident that the public preferred to listen to the great stars. But the house was full enough and enthusiastic enough to awaken in the little Irish girl's breast that form of elation which masks as self-obliteration, and which is the fuel that feeds the fires of art.

Kate had gone with the Fulhams and they, with Blue-eyed Mary and Dr. von Shierbrand, sat together in the box which Mrs. Barsaloux had given them, and where, from time to time, she joined them. But chiefly she hovered around Marna in that dim vast world back of the curtain.

They said of Marna afterward that she was like a spirit. She seemed less and more than a woman, an evanescent essence of feminine delight. Her laughter, her tears, her swift emotions were all as something held for a moment before the eye and snatched away, to leave but the wavering eidolon of their loveliness. She sang with a young Italian who responded exquisitely to the swift, bright, unsubstantial beauty of her acting, and whom she seemed fairly to bathe in the amber loveliness of her voice.

Kate, quivering for her, seeming indefinably to be a part of her, suffering at the hesitancies of the audience and shaken with their approval, was glad when it was all over. She hastened out to be with the crowd and to hear what they were saying. They were warm in their praise, but Kate was dissatisfied. She longed for something more emphatic—some excess of acclaim. She wondered if they were waiting for more authoritative audiences to set the stamp of approval on Marna. It did not occur to her that they had found the performance too opalescent and elusive.

Kate wondered if the girl would feel that anything had been missing, but Marna seemed to be basking in the happiness of the hour. The great German prima donna had kissed her with tears in her eyes; the French baritone had spoken his compliments with convincing ardor; dozens had crowded about her with congratulations; and now, at the head of the glittering table in an opulent room, the little descendant of minstrels sat and smiled upon her friends. A gilded crown of laurel leaves rested on her dark hair; her white neck arose delicately from the yellowed lace and the shining silk; the sunny opals rested upon her shoulders.

"I drink," cried the French baritone, "to a voice of honey and an ivory throat."

"To a great career," supplemented David Fulham.

"And happiness," Kate broke in, standing with the others and forgetting to be abashed by the presence of so many. Then she called to Marna:—

"I was afraid they would leave out happiness."

Kate might have been the belated fairy godmother who brought this gift in the nick of time. Those at the table smiled at her indulgently,—she was so eager, so young, so almost fierce. She had dressed herself in white without frill or decoration, and the clinging folds of her gown draped her like a slender, chaste statue. She wore no jewels,—she had none, indeed,—and her dark coiled hair in no way disguised the shape of her fine head. The elaborate Polish contralto across from her, splendid as a mediaeval queen, threw Kate's simplicity into sharp contrast. Marna turned adoring eyes upon her; Mrs. Barsaloux, that inveterate encourager of genius, grieved that the girl had no specialty for her to foster; the foreigners paid her frank tribute, and there was no question but that the appraisement upon her that night was high.

As for Mama's happiness, for which Kate had put in her stipulation, it was coming post-haste, though by a circuitous road.

Mrs. Dennison, who had received tickets from Marna, and who had begged her nephew, George Fitzgerald, to act as her escort, was, in her fashion, too, wondering about the question of happiness for the girl. She was an old-fashioned creature, mid-Victorian in her sincerity. She had kissed one man and one only, and him had she married, and sorrowing over her childless estate she had become, when she laid her husband in his grave, "a widow indeed." Her abundant affection, disused by this accident of fate, had spent itself in warm friendships, and in her devotion to her dead sister's child. She had worked for him till the silver came into her hair; had sent him through his classical course and through the medical college, and the day when she saw him win his title of doctor of medicine was the richest one of her middle life.

He sat beside her now, strangely pale and disturbed. The opera, she was sorry to note, had not interested him as she had expected it would. He had, oddly enough, been reluctant to accompany her, and, as she was accustomed to his quick devotion, this distressed her not a little. Was he growing tired of her? Was he ashamed to be seen at the opera with a quiet woman in widow's dress, a touch shabby? Was her much-tired heart to have a last cruel blow dealt it? Accustomed to rather somber pathways of thought, she could not escape this one; yet she loyally endeavored to turn from it, and from time to time she stole a look at the stern, pale face beside her to discover, if she could, what had robbed him of his good cheer.

For he had been a happy boy. His high spirits had constituted a large part of his attraction for her. When he had come to her orphaned, it had been with warm gratitude in his heart, and with the expectation of being loved. As he grew older, that policy of life had become accentuated. He was expectant in all that he did. His temperamental friendliness had carried him through college, winning for him a warm group of friends and the genuine regard of his professors. It was helping him to make his way in the place he had chosen for his field of action. He had not gone into the more fashionable part of town, but far over on the West Side, where the slovenliness of the central part of the city shambles into a community of parks and boulevards, crude among their young trees surrounded by neat, self-respecting apartment houses. Such communities are to be found in all American cities; communities which set little store by fashion, which prize education (always providing it does not prove exotic and breed genius or any form of disturbing beauty), live within their incomes and cultivate the manifest virtues. The environment suited George Fitzgerald. He had an honest soul without a bohemian impulse in him. He recognized himself as being middle-class, and he was proud and glad of it. He liked to be among people who kept their feet on the earth—people whose yea was yea and whose nay was nay. What was Celtic in him could do no more for him than lend a touch of almost flaring optimism to the Puritan integrity of his character.

Sundays, as a matter of habit, and occasionally on other days, he was his aunt's guest at the Caravansary. The intellectual cooeperatives there liked him, as indeed everybody did, everywhere. Invariably Mrs. Dennison was told after his departure that she was a fortunate woman to have such an adopted son. Yet Fitzgerald knew very well that he was unable to be completely himself among his aunt's patrons. Their conversation was too glancing; they too often said what they did not mean, for mere conversation's sake; they played with ideas, tossing them about like juggler's balls; and they attached importance to matters which seemed to him of little account.

Of late he had been going to his aunt's but seldom, and he had stayed away because he wanted, above all things in the world, to go. It had become an agony to go—an anguish to absent himself. Which being interpreted, means that he was in love. And whom should he love but Marna? Why should any man trouble himself to love another woman when this glancing, flashing, singing bird was winging it through the blue? Were any other lips so tender, so tremulous, so arched, so sweet? The breath that came between them was perfumed with health; the little rows of gleaming teeth were indescribably provocative. Actually, the little red tongue itself seemed to fold itself upward, at the edges, like a tender leaf. As for her nostrils, they were delicately flaring like those of some wood creature, and fashioned for the enjoyment of odorous banquets undreamed of by duller beings. Her eyes, like pools in shade, breathing mystery and dreams, got between him and his sleep and held him intoxicated in his bed.

Yes, that was Marna as she looked to the eye of love. She was made for one man's love and nothing else, yet she was about to become the well-loved of the great world! She was not for him—was not made for a man of his mould. She had flashed from obscurity to something rich and plenteous, obviously the child of Destiny—a little princess waiting for her crown. He had not even talked to her many times, and she had no notion that when she entered the room he trembled; and that when she spoke to him and turned the swimming loveliness of her eyes upon him, he had trouble to keep his own from filling with tears.

And this was the night of her dedication to the world; the world was seating her upon her throne, acclaiming her coronation. There was nothing for him but to go on through an interminably long life, bearing a brave front and hiding his wound.

He loathed the incoherent music; detested the conductor; despised the orchestra; felt murderous toward the Italian tenor; and could have slain the man who wrote the opera, since it made his bright girl a target for praise and blame. He feared his aunt's scrutiny, for she had sharp perceptions, and he could have endured anything better than that she should spy upon his sacred pain. So he sat by her side, passionately solitary amid a crowd and longing to hide himself from the society of all men.

But he must be distrait, indeed, if he could forget the claim his good aunt had upon him. He knew how she loved gayety; and her daily life offered her little save labor and monotony.

"Supper next," he said with forced cheerfulness as they came out of the opera-house together. "I'll do the ordering. You'll enjoy a meal for once which is served independently of you."

He tried to talk about this and that as they made their way on to a glaring below-stairs restaurant, where after-theater folk gathered. The showy company jarred hideously on Fitzgerald, yet gave him a chance to save his face by pretending to watch it. He could tell his aunt who some of the people were, and she would transfer her curiosity from him to them.

"They'll be having a glorious time at Miss Cartan's supper," mused Mrs. Dennison. "How she shines, doesn't she, George? And when you think of her beginnings there on that Wisconsin farm, isn't it astonishing?"

"Those weren't her beginnings, I fancy," George said, venturing to taste of discussion concerning her as a brandy-lover may smell a glass he swears he will not drink. "Her beginnings were very long ago. She's a Celt, and she has the witchery of the Celts. How I'd love to hear her recite some of the new Irish poems!"

"She'd do it beautifully, George. She does everything beautifully. If I'd had a daughter like that, boy, what a different thing my life would be! Or if you were to give me—"

George clicked his ice sharply in his glass. "See," he said, "there's Hackett coming in—Hackett the actor. Handsome devil, isn't he?"

"Don't use that tone, George," said his aunt reprovingly. "Handsome devil, indeed! He's a good-looking man. Can't you say that in a proper way? I don't want you to be sporty in your talk, George. I always tried when you were a little boy to keep you from talking foolishly."

"Oh, there's no danger of my being foolish," he said. "I'm as staid and dull as ever you could wish me to be!"

For the first time in her life she found him bitter, but she had the sense at last to keep silent. His eyes were full of pain, and as he looked about the crowded room with its suggestions of indulgent living, she saw something in his face leap to meet it—something that seemed to repudiate the ideals she had passed on to him. Involuntarily, Anne Dennison reached out her firm warm hand and laid it on the quivering one of her boy.

"A new thought has just come to you!" she said softly. "Before you were through with your boast, lad, your temptation came. I saw it. Are you lonely, George? Are you wanting something that Aunt Anne can give you? Won't you speak out to me?"

He drew his hand away from hers.

"No one in the world can give me what I want," he said painfully. "Forgive me, auntie; and let's talk of other things."

He had pushed her back into that lonely place where the old often must stand, and she shivered a little as if a cold wind blew over her. He saw it and bent toward her contritely.

"You must help me," he said. "I am very unhappy. I suppose almost everybody has been unhappy like this sometime. Just bear with me, Aunt Anne, dear, and help me to forget for an hour or two."

Anne Dennison regarded him understandingly.

"Here comes our lobster," she said, "and while we eat it, I'll tell you the story of the first time I ever ate at a restaurant."

He nodded gratefully. After all, while she lived, he could not be utterly bereft.



X

He had taken her home and was leaving, when a carriage passed him. He could hear the voices of the occupants—the brisk accents of Mrs. Barsaloux, and the slow, honey-rich tones of Marna. He had never dreamed that he could do such a thing, but he ran forward with an almost frantic desire to rest his eyes upon the girl's face, and he was beside the curb when the carriage drew up at the door of the house where Mrs. Barsaloux and Marna lodged. He flung open the door in spite of the protests of the driver, who was not sure of his right to offer such a service, and held out his hand to Mrs. Barsaloux. That lady accepted his politeness graciously, and, weary and abstracted, moved at once toward the house-steps, searching meantime for her key. Fitzgerald had fifteen seconds alone with Marna. She stood half-poised upon the carriage-steps, her hand in his, their eyes almost on a level. Then he said an impossible and insane thing. It was wrung out of his misery, out of his knowledge of her loveliness.

"I've lost you!" he whispered. "Do you know that to-night ended my happiness?"

Mama's lips parted delicately; her eyes widened; her swift Celtic spirit encompassed his grief.

"Oh!" she breathed. "Don't speak so! Don't spoil my beautiful time!"

"Not I," he retorted sharply, speaking aloud this time. "Far be it from me! Good-bye."

Mrs. Barsaloux heard him vaguely above the jangling of coins and keys and the rushing of a distant train.

"You're not going to leave town, are you, Dr. Fitzgerald?" she inquired casually. "I thought your good-bye had a final accent to it."

She was laughing in her easy way, quite unconscious of what was taking place. She had made an art of laughing, and it carried her and others over many difficult places. But for once it was powerless to lessen the emotional strain. Mysteriously, Fitzgerald and Marna were experiencing a sweet torment in their parting. It was not that she loved him or had thought of him in that way at all. She had seen him often and had liked his hearty ways, his gay spirits, and his fine upstanding figure, but he had been as one who passed by with salutations. Now, suddenly, she was conscious that he was a man to be desired. She saw his wistful eyes, his avid lips, his great shoulders. The woman in her awoke to a knowledge of her needs. Upon such a shoulder might a woman weep, from such eyes might a woman gather dreams; to allay such torment as his might a woman give all she had to give. It was incoherent, mad, but not unmeaning. It had, indeed, the ultimate meaning.

He said nothing more; she spoke no word. Each knew they would meet on the morrow.

The next night, Kate Barrington, making her way swiftly down the Midway in a misty gloom, saw the little figure of Marna Cartan fluttering before her. It was too early for dinner, and Kate guessed that Marna was on her way to pay her a visit—a not rare occurrence these last few weeks. She called to her, and Marna waited, turning her face for a moment to the mist-bearing wind.

"I was going to you," she said breathlessly.

"So I imagined, bright one."

"Are you tired, Kate, mavourneen?"

"A little. It's been a hard day. I don't see why my heart isn't broken, considering the things I see and hear, Marna! I don't so much mind about the grown-ups. If they succeed in making a mess of things, why, they can take the consequences. But the kiddies—they're the ones that torment me. Try as I can to harden myself, and to say that after I've done my utmost my responsibility ends, I can't get them off my mind. But what's on your mind, bright one?"

"Oh, Kate, so much! But wait till we get to the house. It's not a thing to shriek out here on the street."

The wind swept around the corner, buffeting them, and Kate drew Marna's arm in her own and fairly bore the little creature along with her. They entered the silent house, groped through the darkened hall and up the stairs to Kate's own room.

"Honora isn't home, I fancy," she said, in apology for the pervading desolation. "She stays late at the laboratory these nights. She says she's on the verge of a wonderful discovery. It's something she and David have been working out together, but she's been making some experiments in secret, with which she means to surprise David. Of course she'll give all the credit to him—that's her policy. She's his helpmate, she says, nothing more."

"But the babies?" asked Marna with that naivete characteristic of her. "Where are they?"

"Up in the nursery at the top of the house. It will be light and warm there, I think. Honora had a fireplace put in so that it would be cheerful. I always feel sure it's pleasant up there, however forbidding the rest of the house may look."

"Mary has made a great difference with it since she came, hasn't she? Of course Honora couldn't do the wonderful things she's doing and be fussing around the house all the time. Still, she might train her servants, mightn't she?"

"Well, there aren't really any to train," said Kate. "There's Mrs. Hays, the nurse, a very good woman, but as we take our meals out, and are all so independent, there's no one else required, except occasionally. Honora wouldn't think of such an extravagance as a parlor maid. We're a community of working folk, you see."

Marna had been lighting the candles which Kate usually kept for company; and, moreover, since there was kindling at hand, she laid a fire and touched a match to it.

"I must have it look homey, Kate—for reasons."

"Do whatever it suits you to do, child."

"But can I tell you what it suits me to do, Kate?"

"How do I know? Are you referring to visible things or talking in parables? There's something very eerie about you to-night, Marna. Your eyes look phosphorescent. What's been happening to you? Is it the glory of last night that's over you yet?"

"No, not that. It's—it's a new glory, Kate."

"A new glory, is it? Since last night? Tell me, then."

Kate flung her long body into a Morris chair and prepared to listen. Marna looked about her as if seeking a chair to satisfy her whim, and, finding none, sank upon the floor before the blaze. She leaned back, resting on one slight arm, and turned her dream-haunted face glowing amid its dark maze of hair, till her eyes could hold those of her friend.

"Oh, Kate!" she breathed, and made her great confession in those two words.

"A man!" cried Kate, alarmed. "Now!"

"Now! Last night. And to-day. It was like lightning out of a clear sky. I've seen him often, and now I remember it always warmed me to see him, and made me feel that I wasn't alone. For a long time, I believe, I've been counting him in, and being happier because he was near. But I didn't realize it at all—till last night."

"You saw him after the opera?"

"Only for half a minute, at the door of my house. We only said a word or two. He whispered he had lost me—that I had killed him. Oh, I don't remember what he said. But we looked straight at each other. I didn't sleep all night, and when I lay awake I tried to think of the wonderful fact that I had made my debut, and that it wasn't a failure, at any rate. But I couldn't think about that, or about my career. I couldn't hold to anything but the look in his eyes and the fact that I was to see him to-day. Not that he said so. But we both knew. Why, we couldn't have lived if we hadn't seen each other to-day."

"And you did?"

"Oh, we did. He called me up on the telephone about two o'clock, and said he had waited as long as he could, and that he'd been walking the floor, not daring to ring till he was sure that I'd rested enough after last night. So I told him to come, and he must have been just around the corner, for he was there in a minute. I wanted him to come in and sit down, but he said he didn't believe a house could hold such audacity as his. So we went out on the street. It was cold and bleak. The Midway was a long, gray blankness. I felt afraid of it, actually. All the world looked forbidding to me—except just the little place where I walked with him. It was as if there were a little warm beautiful radius in which we could keep together, and live for each other, and comfort each other, and keep harm away."

"Oh, Marna! And you, with a career before you! What do you mean to do?"

"I don't know what to do. We don't either of us know what to do. He says he'll go mad with me on the stage, wearing myself out, the object of the jealousy of other women and of love-making from the men. He—says it's a profanation. I tried to tell him it couldn't be a profanation to serve art; but, Kate, he didn't seem to know what I meant. He has such different standards. He wanted to know what I was going to do when I was old. He said I'd have no real home, and no haven of love; and that I'd better be the queen of his home as long as I lived than to rule it a little while there on the stage and then—be forgotten. Oh, it isn't what he said that counts. All that sounds flat enough as I repeat it. It's the wonder of being with some one that loves you like that and of feeling that there are two of you who belong—"

"How do you know you belong?" asked Kate with sharp good sense. "Why, bright one, you've been swept off your feet by mere—forgive me—by mere sex."

That glint of the eyes which Kate called Celtic flashed from Marna.

"Mere sex!" she repeated. "Mere sex! You're not trying to belittle that, are you? Why, Kate, that's the beginning and the end of things. What I've always liked about you is that you look big facts in the face and aren't afraid of truth. Sex! Why, that's home and happiness and all a woman really cares for, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't all she cares for," declared Kate valiantly. "She cares for a great many other things. And when I said mere sex I was trying to put it politely. Is it really home and lifelong devotion that you two are thinking about, or are you just drunk with youth and—well, with infatuation?"

Marna turned from her to the fire.

"Kate," she said, "I don't know what you call it, but when I looked in his eyes I felt as if I had just seen the world for the first time. I have liked to live, of course, and to study, and it was tremendously stirring, singing there before all those people. But, honestly, I can see it would lead nowhere. A few years of faint celebrity, an empty heart, a homeless life—then weariness. Oh, I know it. I have a trick of seeing things. Oh, he's the man for me, Kate. I realized it the moment he pointed it out. We could not be mistaken. I shall love him forever and he'll love me just as I love him."

"By the way," said Kate, "who is he? Someone from the opera company?"

"Who is he? Why, he's George Fitzgerald, of course."

"Mrs. Dennison's nephew?"

"Certainly. Who else should it be?"

"Why, he's a pleasant enough young man—very cheerful and quite intelligent—but, Marna—"

Marna leaped to her feet.

"You're not in a position to pass judgment upon him, Kate. How can you know what a wonderful soul he has? Why, there's no one so brave, or so humble, or so sweet, or with such a worship for women—"

"For you, you mean."

"Of course I mean for me. You don't suppose I'd endure it to have him worshiping anybody else, do you? Oh, it's no use protesting. I only hope that Mrs. Barsaloux won't."

"Yes, doesn't that give you pause? Think of all Mrs. Barsaloux has done for you; and she did it with the understanding that you were to go on the stage. She was going to get her reward in the contribution you made to art."

Marna burst into rippling laughter.

"I'll give her something better than art, Kate Crosspatch. I'll give her a home—and I'll name my first girl after her."

"Marna!" gasped Kate. "You do go pretty fast for a little thing."

"Oh, I'm Irish," laughed Marna. "We Irish are a very old people. We always knew that if you loved a man, you had to have him or die, and that if you had him, you'd love to see the look of him coming out in your sons and daughters."

Suddenly the look of almost infantile blitheness left her face. The sadness which is inherent in the Irish countenance spread over it, like sudden mist over a landscape. The ancient brooding aspect of the Celts was upon her.

"Yes," she repeated, "we Irish are very old, and there is nothing about life—or death—that we do not know."

Kate was not quite sure what she meant, but with a sudden impulse she held out her arms to the girl, who, with a low cry, fled to them. Then her bright bravery melted in a torrent of tears.



XI

They had met like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the whole thing to Mrs. Barsaloux.

Now, Mrs. Barsaloux was a kind woman, and one with plenty of sentiment in her composition. But she believed that there were times when Love should not be given the lead. Naturally, it seemed to her that this was one of them. She had spent much money upon the education of this girl whom she had "assumed," as Marna sometimes playfully put it. Nothing but her large, active, and perhaps interfering benevolence and Mama's winning and inexplicable charm held the two together, and the very slightness of their relationship placed them under peculiar obligations to each other.

"It's ungrateful of you," Mrs. Barsaloux explained, "manifestly ungrateful! It's your role to love nothing but your career." She was not stern, merely argumentative.

"But didn't you expect me ever to love any one?" queried Marna.

Mrs. Barsaloux contemplated a face and figure made for love from the beginning, and delicately ripened for it, like a peach in the sun.

"But you could have waited, my dear girl. There's time for both the love and the career."

Marna shook her head slowly.

"George says there isn't," she answered with an irritating sweetness. "He says I'm not to go on the stage at all. He says—"

"Don't 'he says' me like that, Marna," cried her friend. "It sounds too unutterably silly. Here you are with a beautiful talent—every one agrees about that—and a chance to develop it. I've made many sacrifices to give you that chance. Very well; you've had your trial before the public. You've made good. You could repay yourself and me for all that has been involved in your development, and you meet a man and come smiling to me and say that we're to throw the whole thing over because 'he says' to."

Marna made no answer at all, but Mrs. Barsaloux saw her settle down in the deep chair in which she was sitting as if to huddle away from the storm about to break over her.

"She isn't going to offer any resistance," thought the distressed patron with dismay. "Her mind is completely made up and she's just crouching down to wait till I'm through with my private little hurricane."

So, indeed, it proved. Mrs. Barsaloux felt she had the right to say much, and she said it. Marna may or may not have listened. She sat shivering and smiling in her chair, and when it was fit for her to excuse herself, she did, and walked out bravely; but Mrs. Barsaloux noticed that she tottered a little as she reached the door. She did not go to her aid, however.

"It's an infatuation," she concluded. "I must treat her as if she had a violent disease and take care of her. When people are delirious they must be protected against themselves. It's a delirium with her, and the best thing I can do is to run off to New York with her. She can make her next appearance when the opera company gets there. I'll arrange it this afternoon."

She refrained from telling Marna of her plans, but she went straight to the city and talked over the situation with her friend the impresario. He seemed anything but depressed. On the contrary, he was excited—even exalted.

"Spirit her away, madam," he advised. "Of course she will miss her lover horribly, and that will be the best thing that can happen to her. Why did not the public rise to her the other night? Not because she could not sing: far from it. If a nightingale sings, then Miss Cartan does. But she left her audience a little cold. Let us face the facts. You saw it. We all saw it. And why? Because she was too happy, madam; too complaisant; too uninstructed in the emotions. Now it will be different. We will take her away; we will be patient with her while she suffers; afterward she will bless us, for she will have discovered the secret of the artist, and then when she opens her little silver throat we shall have SONG."

Mrs. Barsaloux, with many compunctions, and with some pangs of pure motherly sympathy, nevertheless agreed.

"If only he had been a man above the average," she said, as she tearfully parted from the great man, "perhaps it would not have mattered so much."

The impresario lifted his eyebrows and his mustaches at the same time and assumed the aspect of a benevolent Mephistopheles.

"The variety of man, madam," he said sententiously, "makes no manner of difference. It is the tumult in Miss Marna's soul which I hope we shall be able to utilize"—he interrupted himself with a smile and a bow as he opened the door for his departing friend—"for the purposes of art."

Mrs. Barsaloux sat in the middle of her taxi seat all the way home, and saw neither street, edifice, nor human being. She was looking back into her own busy, confused, and frustrated life, and was remembering certain things which she had believed were buried deep. Her heart misgave her horribly. Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration. So she put her memories and her tendernesses out of sight and walked up the stairs with purpose in her tread.

* * * * *

She meant to "have it out" with the girl, who was, she believed, reasonable enough after all.

"She's been without her mother for so long," she mused, "that it's no wonder she's lacking in self-control. I must have the firmness that a mother would have toward her. It would be the height of cruelty to let her have her own way in this."

If the two could have met at that moment, it would have changed the course of both their lives. But a trifle had intervened. Marna Cartan had gone walking; and she never came back. Only, the next day, radiantly beautiful, with fresh flowers in her hands, Marna Fitzgerald came running in begging to be forgiven. She tried to carry the situation with her impetuosity. She was laughing, crying, pleading. She got close to her old friend as if she would enwrap her in her influence. She had the veritable aspect of the bride. Whatever others might think regarding her lost career, it was evident that she believed the great hour had just struck for her. Her husband was with her.

"Haven't you any apology to make, sir?" poor Mrs. Barsaloux cried to him. He looked matter-of-fact, she thought, and as if he ought to be able to take a reasonable view of things. But she had misjudged. Perhaps it was his plain, everyday, commercial garments which deceived her and made her think him open to week-day arguments; for at that moment he was really a knight of romance, and at Mrs. Barsaloux's question his eyes gleamed with unsuspected fires.

"Who could be so foolish as to apologize for happiness like ours?" he demanded.

"Aren't you going to forgive us, dear?" pleaded Marna.

But Mrs. Barsaloux couldn't quite stand that.

"You sound like an old English comedy, Marna," she said impatiently. "You're of age; I'm no relation to you; you've a perfect right to be married. Better take advantage of being here to pack your things. You'll need them."

"You mean that I'm not expected to come here again, tante?"

"I shall sail for France in a week," said Mrs. Barsaloux wearily.

"For France, tante? When did you decide?"

"This minute," said the lady, and gave the married lovers to understand that the interview was at an end.

Marna went weeping down the street, holding on to her George's arm.

"If she'd been Irish, she'd have cursed me," she sobbed, "and then I'd have had something to go on, so to speak. Perhaps I could have got her to take it off me in time. But what are you going to do with a snubbing like that?"

"Oh, leave it for the Arctic explorers to explain. They're used to being in below-zero temperature," George said with a troubled laugh. "I'm sure I can't waste any time thinking about a woman who could stand out against you, Marna, the way you are this day, and the way you're looking."

"But, George, she thinks I'm a monster."

"Then there's something wrong with her zoology. You're an—"

"Don't call me an angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I hate to be called—they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've done wrong."

* * * * *

Kate was never to forget that night. She had come in from a day of difficult and sordid work. For once, the purpose back of all her toil among the people there in the great mill town was lost sight of in the sheer repulsiveness of the tasks she had had to perform. The pathos of their temptations, the terrific disadvantages under which they labored, their gray tragedies, had some way lost their import. She was merely a dreadfully fagged woman, disgusted with evil, with dirt and poverty. She was at outs with her world and impatient with the suffering involved in the mere living of life.

Moreover, when she had come into the house, she had found it dark as usual. The furnace was down, and her own room was cold. But she had set her teeth together, determined not to give way to depression, and had made her rather severe toilet for dinner when word was brought to her by the children's nurse that Dr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald desired to see her. For a moment she could not comprehend what that might mean; then the truth assailed her, took her by the hand, and ran her down the stairs into Mama's arms.

"But it's outrageous," she cried, hugging Marna to her. "How could you be so willful?"

"It's glorious," retorted Marna. "And if I ever was going to be willful, now's the time."

"Right you are," broke in George. "What does Stevenson say about that? 'Youth is the time to be up and doing.' You're not going to be severe with us, Miss Barrington? We've been counting on you."

"Have you?" inquired Kate, putting Marna aside and taking her husband by the hand. "Well, you are your own justification, you two. But haven't you been ungrateful?"

Marna startled her by a bit of Dionysian philosophy.

"Is it ungrateful to be happy?" she demanded. "Would anybody have been in the right who asked us to be unhappy? Why don't you call us brave? Do you imagine it isn't difficult to have people we love disapproving of us? But you know yourself, Kate, if we'd waited forty-eight hours, I'd have been dragged off to live with my career."

She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her coat. Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it.

"You don't look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted.

"Oh," sighed Fitzgerald, "I only just barely got her in time!"

"And now what do you propose doing?"

"Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live—for a home."

"Do you mean a flat?" asked Kate with a flick of satire.

"A flat, or anything. It doesn't matter much what."

"Or where?"

"It will be on the West Side," said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald.

"And who'll keep house for you? Must you find servants?"

"Why, Kate, we're dreadfully poor," cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty were a mere adventure. "Didn't you know that? I shall do my own work."

"Oh, we've both got to work," added Fitzgerald.

He didn't say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold—perhaps an impious—thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into service for him. Evidently he didn't think that way. Neither minded any sacrifice apparently. The whole of it was, they were together. Suddenly, they seemed to forget Kate. They stood gazing at each other as if their sense of possession overwhelmed them. Kate felt something like angry resentment stir in her. How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary, so homeless?

"Will you stay to dinner with me?" she asked with something like asperity.

"To dinner?" they murmured in vague chorus. "No, thanks."

"But where do you intend to have dinner?"

"We—we haven't thought," confessed Marna.

"Oh, anywhere," declared Fitzgerald.

Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her.

They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets. She kissed them both, with tears, and said:—

"God bless you."

That seemed to be what they wanted. They longed to be blessed.

"That's what Aunt Dennison said," smiled Fitzgerald.

Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison "aunt." But Marna looked as if she liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers, laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way, outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song.

Kate wrapped her old coat about her and made her solitary way to Mrs. Dennison's depressed Caravansary.



XII

There was no question about it. Life was supplying Kate Barrington with a valuable amount of "data." On every hand the emergent or the reactionary woman offered herself for observation, although to say that Kate was able to take a detached and objective view of it would be going altogether too far. The truth was, she threw herself into every friend's trouble, and she counted as friends all who turned to her, or all whom she was called upon to serve.

A fortnight after Mama's marriage, an interesting episode came Kate's way. Mrs. Barsaloux had introduced to the Caravansary a Mrs. Leger whom she had once met on the steamer on her way to Brindisi, and she had invited her to join her during a stay in Chicago. Mrs. Barsaloux, however, having gone off to France in a hot fit of indignation, Mrs. Leger presented herself with a letter from Mrs. Barsaloux to Mrs. Dennison. That hospitable woman consented to take in the somewhat enigmatic stranger.

That she was enigmatic all were quick to perceive. She was beautiful, with a delicate, high-bred grace, and she had the manner of a woman who had been courted and flattered. As consciously beautiful as Mary Morrison, she bore herself with more discretion. Taste governed all that she said and did. Her gowns, her jewels, her speech were distinguished. She seemed by all tokens an accomplished worldling; yet it was not long before Kate discovered that it was anything but worldly matters which were consuming her attention.

She had come to Chicago for the purpose of adjusting her fortune,—a large one, it appeared,—and of concluding her relations with the world. She had decided to go into a convent, and had chosen one of those numerous sisterhoods which pass their devotional days upon the bright hill-slopes without Naples. She refrained from designating the particular sisterhood, and she permitted no discussion of her motives. She only said that she had not been born a Catholic, but had turned to Mother Church when the other details of life ceased to interest her. She was a widow, but she seemed to regard her estate with quiet regret merely. If tragedy had entered her life, it must have been subsequent to widowhood. She had a son, but it appeared that he had no great need of her. He was in the care of his paternal grandparents, who were giving him an education. He was soon to enter Oxford, and she felt confident that his life would be happy. She was leaving him an abundance; she had halved her fortune and was giving her share to the convent.